Soldier killed saving others receives posthumous award

A young army sergeant who was killed shielding his fellow soldiers from an exploding grenade during a shoot-out in Dagestan has posthumously been made a Hero of Russia.

­Twenty-three-year-old Evgeny Epov had been deployed to the North Caucasus in January. On January 27, his unit became involved in a gunfight with militants.

Epov jumped onto a grenade that had landed nearby to prevent it from injuring other soldiers. Three more soldiers were killed in the battle.

Earlier this year, another soldier was also posthumously awarded the Hero of Russia medal after a similar act of bravery.

Major Sergey Solnechnikov was killed during a military exercise in the Far East, when a grenade thrown by one of the soldiers bounced back into a group of conscripts.